Survey: Marketers like Facebook best for social media

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Marketing professionals in Greater Reno-Lake Tahoe are using Facebook for more than just posting vacation photos or cute pictures of their children.

A survey of more than 100 regional marketers about their use of social media to promote their businesses finds that more than 90 percent use Facebook pages as a tool to extend their reach and promote their company brands.

Milena Regos, founder of Out&About Marketing of Incline Village, conducted her firm’s second social media usage survey during the past few months. In addition to Facebook, marketing pros relied heavily on Twitter, company blogs and YouTube accounts for their social media presence.

The three primary challenges of social media marketing, the survey finds, include measuring effectiveness, proving the value of social media and providing relevant content.

Committing time to manage a company’s presence on social media sites also is one of the more difficult aspects of regional social media campaigns.

Nearly half the regional marketers surveyed spent at least a full eight-hour workday each week managing marketing campaigns through social media outlets.

However, as use of social media as a marketing tool becomes more prevalent in the workplace, the challenge of finding enough time to brainstorm and implement a social media marketing campaign decreased by 16 percent from last year, the survey finds.

The main goals of regional marketing efforts through sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter: Lead generation (22 percent); conversions (20 percent), revenue generation (16 percent) and sales (13 percent). Nearly 70 percent of marketers queried say that extending their brand’s reach also ranks as a high priority.

To that end, though, only 12 percent of the firms in the survey dedicated a large portion of their total advertising budgets (46 percent or more) to growing their businesses through digital marketing.

One-quarter of firms in the survey did not allocate any funding to such campaigns, although 37 percent of regional firms say they plan to increase their spending in the digital arena by 5 to 10 percent for the coming year.